Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I have not seen the M3800 throttle. Would really like to know how you made that happen. Would also be happy to try and repeat it with mine.

 

That is one of my main concerns: I am attracted by these new hires displays and it is also time for an update.
The real problem is not having an opportunity to use and test it for a while (minimum rental is for 12 months, and it costs almost like buying the full machine)

Inviato dal mio SM-N9005 utilizzando Tapatalk

 

I must say I like the idea behind this laptop and I was dreaming to get a m3800 laptop to be my reprap project's perfect companion, so I did the order back in 2013.12.23 at Dell's Spain website. Last friday the order was cancelled with no notice, I call dell rep and he said it was due screen qhd shortage in Europe, the estimated time to wait now is three months...
Right now no more dreaming and cannot trust Dell anymore after that waste of time... I get my money back and I am looking for similar alternatives(not easy).

Anyway , thank you all for this great thread. I have a nice time reading you every night :hi2:

 

@aleixq: sad story, unfortunately repeated here.



Inviato dal mio SM-N9005 utilizzando Tapatalk

 

I guess you meant 2 months instead of 3 months, otherwise that would be a new record.

Inviato dal mio GT-I9100 con Tapatalk 2

 

Actually in important ways, 8.1 is better. The OSX system is fairly simplistic and doesn't support independent scaling on different monitors, which is important if you have a high dpi display and a more typical one. It's equivalent to the Windows 7 way of only having one scale factor.

App support for this method of high dpi is still young on Windows, but Illustrator is now fixed with Photoshop on the way. Most other apps work pretty well, although some oddball modern apps still using legacy UI toolkits.

 

3 months is what two different reps said... But it could be that :
a) I am in Spain (land of painful records).
b) The reps know nothing

 

b) it's true.
From what I know people that are ordering now have as estimated delivery date March 27th.
I don't guess there is any difference between Italy and Spain in this case.
Maybe it's better that you check on Dell website, it seems that estimated shipping date (you have to add 10 days to have estimated delivery date) is more reliable now.

Inviato dal mio GT-I9100 con Tapatalk 2

 

Hate to burst your bubble, but Windows 8.1 doesn't support truly independent DPI scaling either. It does exactly what Mac OS X does: chooses a single DPI scale factor optimized for one of the displays, and then performs post-render enlargement or shrinking of elements that are displayed on the other displays. That's why even in 8.1 with the automatic scaling option enabled, one display or the other is always going to look a bit blurry; if it were doing truly independent DPI scaling, both could be razor sharp simultaneously, at least when viewing vector graphics such as text.

On the Mac this is exposed with the options of "Optimize for Retina display" and "Optimize for external display", and whichever you choose, you'll find screen elements a bit blurrier than normal on the other. In fact Mac OS is better in this regard since on Windows 8.1, you can ONLY optimize for the primary display, whereas Mac OS lets you optimize for a non-primary display, which can be desirable when for example you're presenting content in a meeting and want the projector display to look best but want to keep content like your desktop icons and system tray on your built-in panel.

Now, all that said, the fundamental Windows approach to scaling has advantages over the Mac side. Looking at single-display setups, on the Mac side, Apple's strategy of having regular art assets and "@2x" art assets means it only renders at regular DPI or 2x DPI, with intermediate options simulated using 2x DPI to render at 4x the simulated resolution and then using GPU scaling to shrink it to fit the physical display (and thus introducing some bluriness even in a single-display setup); more details here. Windows, on the other hand, can use several different scaling factors PRE-render, which very nearly eliminates bluriness when working with vector graphics and reduces the load on the GPU. This approach makes Windows better able to support displays with a wide variety of pixel densities (assuming proper support from apps and higher-res art assets, which are still forthcoming), whereas the Mac can currently only handle "regular DPI" and "2x DPI" hardware. But Apple can afford to take that shortcut because they control both the software and hardware ecosystem (and this simplistic approach is largely why their implementation works so much better right now), and thus as long as they never introduce any hardware that won't work well with their implementation strategy, no one will know about this limitation. Microsoft on the other hand has to ensure that Windows runs well on a huge spectrum of hardware, so they've adopted a much more flexible but much more difficult implementation strategy, and obviously they still have a ways to go before even HiDPI works as well as Apple's side, let alone multi-DPI.

The problem with multi-DPI though is that implementing true multi-DPI functionality would be phenomenally difficult, and it would all be to solve a problem that will go away on its own anyway. First, applications would have to be coded to allow dynamically rescaling themselves (and potentially loading different art assets) all on the fly in a multi-DPI setup in case they were dragged from one display onto the other. That's non-trivial. And even if Microsoft wanted to build an API framework to facilitate that, by the time they baked it into Windows (and updated their own apps) and third parties started coding their apps to take advantage of that new functionality, it's likely that HiDPI displays would have already become the norm anyway on both laptops and desktops, so there wouldn't really BE any more multi-DPI environments that this would benefit. Everything would be running in at a single, HiDPI scale factor, and all of that multi-DPI work will have been for naught. That's why I think we've got the solution we have now, from both Microsoft and Apple, and I doubt either will improve it much. Besides, Microsoft has a lot more work to do just getting HiDPI up to snuff when used on its own, never mind multi-DPI.

 

Dell Precision M3800 15.6" Touchscreen LED Notebook - Intel Core i7 i | Overstock.com Shopping - The Best Deals on Laptops

$2106 seems to be a good price for this model with a 500GB SSD. Does this particular machine actually HAVE 500GB or are they sweetening the pot and just telling me the machine will SUPPORT 500GB?

Stated specs from Overstock's site:
Processor Model: i7-4702HQ
Processor Speed: 2.20 GHz
Processor Core: Quad-core (4 Core)
Cache: 6 MB
64-bit Processing: Yes
vPro Technology: No
Chipset Manufacturer: Intel
Chipset Model: HM87 Express
Standard Memory: 8 GB
Maximum Memory: 8 GB
Memory Technology: DDR3 SDRAM
Memory Standard: DDR3-1600/PC3-12800
Number of Total Memory Slots: 1
Solid State Drive Capacity: 500 GB
Screen Size: 15.6"
Display Screen Type: Active Matrix TFT Color LCD
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Backlight Technology: LED
Touchscreen: Yes
Multi-touch Screen: Yes
Ethernet Technology: Ethernet
Bluetooth: Yes
Bluetooth Standard: Bluetooth 4.0
HDMI: Yes
Total Number of USB Ports: 4
DisplayPort: Yes
Operating System: Windows 7
Keyboard Backlight: Yes
Pointing Device Type: TouchPad
Number of Cells: 6-cell
Height: 0.7"
Width: 14.7"
Depth: 10"

Or $1974??
http://www.provantage.com/dell-462-3487~7DELL341.htm